According to the sociologist Richard Florida, the romantic opposition between the bourgeois and the bohemian no longer applies today. This is because bohemia has been appropriated by capitialism and its formerly antagonistic values have been assimilated into the system .
As a result, he suggests that we moving towards a new 'creative society'.
Who/what are ‘creatives’ exactly? According to him they are a new type of individuals who:
1. are not interested in pay
2. are content-oriented and and for whom job and work environment matter more
3. seek intrinsic rewards
4. seek latitude to use work time and resources to engage in community building and civic action.
What do you think constitutes a creative person? What attitudes, values and dispositions do creative people exhibit?
Neil Turnbull
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A creative person must be one who is more into measuring his own capacity. He must also be courageous because creativity brings defiance against authority and conventional ways of thinking.
ReplyDeleteI think creativity is intimately related to transformative skills. A creative person can transform the bad things befallen to him into things which would be of good use; maybe of a training. He is carefree but not delinquent, hence inquisitive, yet not unchallenged.
He is one who must see underneath the underneath.
The creative is the rebel! We don't see them in institutions and we can't buy them on the high street, so they are invisible.
ReplyDeleteTypically creation is replaced by critique in institutions and I think this is where progress ends.
Let us all log off and make the world over!
It could be that there is something of an overlap between Nietzsche's ubermensche and the creative understood in RF's terms? I agree with Rob that the creative may be characterised as a rebel, and, accordingly, something of an outsider. Perhaps in its purest form, the creative is someone who seeks to 'create their own values' over and above the common herd, which we might now translate as consumers (as expressed in the values of capitalist consumerism).
ReplyDeleteThere is certainly a case to be made for the notion that the bohemian outsider has been assimilated by capitalism, along the way being translated into a 'lifestyle choice' (eg subcultural style) and stripped of any philosophical substance. The notion of hegemonic incorparation of resistance/challenges to the mainstream is certainly something that has exercised cultural theorist for many a long year, though. Dick Hebdige et al and subcultural theory springs to mind, so I am not sure these ideas are particularly new...
Ruth
As to whether we are moving towards a new society of creatives, well, I somewhat doubt this, though perhaps I am being overly pessimistic. Pockets of such creativity within a morass of herd consumerism would be a more accurate picture in my view. I would like to have my mind changed on this, however!
ReplyDeleteRuth
I think that, philosophically, the aim here is to develop a viable 'civic humanism'; a philosophy that advocates a new kind of social arrangement where localities become spaces for the facilitation of the creative abilities of individuals and groups. The information economy, with its decentralising pottentials, is believed to make this kind of project viable.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds more like Marx than Nietzsche to me - but it is clearly utopian. New technologies have promised a freer and farier society for over 40 years and its is 'strange' that this doesn't seem to have happened yet.
Neil Turnbull
The new 'creativity' agenda is also associated with the idea of the gentrified 'post-modern city' that uses creative activity in order to fashion an authentic sense of place and a new respect for local venaculars.
ReplyDeleteCreativity is thus also associated with new media types who view visual media as allowing for the emergence of new virtual cities based on homeworking and new electronic forms of democracy.
Again, more reasons to be highly suspicious of this agenda.
Neil Turnbull